Instagram Wanted To Be “Instagram For Video” Before It Was Cool

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Calling Facebook a copycat isn’t particularly creative; not only did Myspace, Friendster and Makeoutclub have the whole social network thing down first, but Questions, Places, Poke, Messenger, Stickers and so on were all ideas stolen inspired by other startups.

And there are so many more, countless. But while Zuckerberg is indeed the greatest artist, in the case of Instagram video, he didn’t steal.

But on a basic level, calling Instagram’s foray into video “someone else’s idea” is absurd, mainly because Instagram wanted to be “Instagram for video” 14 months before Vine launched on Twitter, and at least four months before the Viddys and Socialcams of the world raised their series A funding. It wanted to be the Instagram for everything.

“We really want to go after something bigger than filtered photos,” Instagram founder Kevin Systrom told me as far back as November 2011, demonstrating that he had the video element of the Instagram product in his crosshairs. He went on the record about this, stating at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing that Instagram Video was (somewhere) on the horizon. Systrom worried about “introducing a new medium too late” as pop-up competitors tried to make the video element of their product a key differentiator.

“Video makes sense to do,” he emphasized. “Our job and our vision is to allow you to tell the story of your life, and whatever tools that may be for video, we’ll end up making them. I’m not sure if that includes filters for video or not, but we’ll definitely consider it.”

If we really want to get nitpicky, Seesmic and 12SecondsTV came up with the brilliant idea of short video sharing before Instagram even existed. As much of the success in the consumer social space is having the right product at the right time, you can’t get all hipster about it. Often, getting all the details (like Cinema) and zeitgeist right matters much more than being first.

If social startups have seen far, it’s because they’ve stood on the shoulders of Makeoutclub.

Disclosure: I own Facebook shares, but think plenty of the things the company does are #lame. Not this, though.

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Crunchbase

OverviewInstagram is a free photo sharing application that enables its users to take photos, apply filters, and share them on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, Flickr, and Posterous. It allows its users to capture and customize their photos and videos with several custom-built filter effects.
Developed by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, Instagram is compatible with all iOS …

OverviewFacebook is an online social networking service that allows its users to connect with friends and family as well as make new connections. It provides its users with the ability to create a profile, update information, add images, send friend requests, and accept requests from other users. Its features include status update, photo tagging and sharing, and more.
Facebook’s profile structure includes …

BioKevin is the CEO and co-founder of Instagram, a community of more than 300 million who capture and share the world’s moments on the service. He is responsible for the company’s overall vision and strategy as well as day-to-day operations.
Prior to founding Instagram, Kevin was part of the startup Odeo, which later became Twitter, and spent two years at Google working on products such as Gmail …